Out in the World

For John Ashbery, Jane Bowles was "one of the finest modern writers of fiction, in any language." Her body of work is small: a novel, a play, and six short stories. And now we have her letters - 133 of them - which, like everything she wrote, are exercises in literary precision. As her editor Millicent Dillon writes, "they are exercises in emotional accuracy as well," little essays in which Bowles explained her joys, doubts, and obesssions to herself and to her correspondents, including her husband, Paul Bowles.